


the thing with teeth

by irishais



Category: Final Fantasy VIII
Genre: Family Feels, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2020-03-01 09:15:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18797401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irishais/pseuds/irishais
Summary: The world is cruel to dreaming boys, and crueler still to her son. Edea & Seifer, post-war.





	the thing with teeth

Whiskey melts down the rocks, icebergs drowning in three inches of amber. Somewhere in another room, the clock ticks away minute after minute after minute. 

Edea picks up the glass between her palms, rolling it to clink the remnants of ice against the sides, but it doesn’t serve to be the distraction she expects, and she sets it back down again, precisely on top of the condensation ring already on the wooden tabletop.

This is not the conversation she wants to have, but here they are, with all this silence to fill. Her golden boy, her sweet cherubim baby. He is neither of those things, and he will always be them both, deep down inside beneath the layers he’s built against the universe. 

The world is too cruel for dreamers like him. 

“I wanted you, you know,” she says finally. “More than anything. More than  _life_. When you were laid in my arms for the first time, I felt  _whole_.”

The hospital bright and clinical clean, the smell of death still lingering around the edges– his parents had been killed in a minor skirmish on the Esthari border (as if any sort of battle that ends in corpses and ashes could be called  _minor_ ), his birth mother a sorceress with no control over her gifts, the phone call unexpected but not unanswered. Cid had stayed at home with their current fosters; they had been down this path a dozen times already. 

Edea Kramer’s home for wayward youth, and infants with bright blonde hair, sea-glass eyes too innocent for this world. He had been so small, and now look at him, hulking, filling up so much of the space without even trying. They had put him in her arms, and he had looked up at her with so much  _trust_ , and she had signed the adoption papers without even thinking twice about it. Her son, her sweet, precious little boy. 

She remembers whispering,  _nothing else bad will ever happen to you_. How wrong she’d been. 

The world isn’t made for men like him, forged from fire, magic, fury.

Her son says nothing, just stares into his own glass, silent, heavier around the edges, like something is sitting on his shoulders, bearing down hard. She wonders how much of that is herself, in a black dress and a plumed collar, midnight claws digging into his throat.

Edea shakes her head, and half-expects to hear the jangling of gilded jewels. There is only the whisper of her hair in its place, still long, dark as pitch. This conversation is overdue. Saying what she does is the hardest thing she’s had to undertake since coming back from the war, and it’s astonishing Seifer has agreed to see her at all.

“I should have just stayed in Centra. Ignored the prophecy. Ignored everything– kept you  _safe_.”

“But you didn’t.”

His voice sounds hollow, and beneath that, betrayed. She deserves every ounce of that betrayal, that hurt and anger that he carries simmering beneath his skin– she’s damned him, just by being his mother.

“I didn’t. I’m sorry.”

Her whiskey comes up, smoked honey that burns clean all the way down, some fancy, expensive bottle Cid keeps trying to save for a special occasion. Life is too short to bury a bottle in the back of the liquor cabinet; don’t they all know that from personal experience at this point? She takes another sip.

“Did you know? That she was going to come for me?”

Did she? Edea shrugs, because it’s the most honest she can be. “I didn’t know what she was going to do– all I could think about was keeping her from any of you, and I think she pulled your name out of my mind, the most precious thing I had.”

But can she even say that, spending most of his youth on a ship out to sea, protecting some other child rather than her own son?

_It was for their own good._

She has made many hard choices in her life, but loving her children? Has always been the easiest thing in the world. Edea reaches across the table, covering his broad hand with one of her own, her fingers small and slim against his too-warm skin.

She had tried to keep him from the succession, and in doing so, she has thrown him right in the midst of it.

He flinches at the touch, but doesn’t withdraw his hand. The stillness, somehow, is worse. Would it be easier if he hated her? Probably. But instead he is wounded, betrayed, but he is still her boy, and that is going to make this harder on them both, trying to push past the inevitable, callous hand that fate has dealt.

Edea finds her own resolve, looking him square in the eyes, even if his gaze doesn’t quite meet hers. It will take time– it will take time. Everything does.

“I will never let anything like that happen to you ever again, Seifer. I promise.”

It is not a promise she has any right to make, not again, but he needs to  _know_. She would rather die than watch him suffer and hurt and rage because he is too young to understand that the world is a thing with sharp teeth and nails, that it will swallow you up before you can even blink if you let down your guard for one split-second.

He’s so young, and yet he isn’t a boy anymore; she can see it in his gaze. He doesn’t believe her.  _Wants_  to, wants to so badly it must eat him up inside, but doesn’t.

She doesn’t know if that’s better, or worse, than she was expecting. 

“What do we do now, then?” Seifer asks, as he slips his hand from beneath hers, raising his glass to his lips instead. 

Edea has no answer, none that he will like, anyway. 

“We try to pick up the pieces, I guess.” 

He picks up the bottle instead, and pours them both a second glass. 


End file.
